7 Vital (Yet Simple and Often Forgotten) SEO Tasks for Small Businesses

Like most small business owners, you’re probably busy running a successful business and don’t have the time to become an SEO expert. Maybe you’ve hired an SEO firm, but you’re not seeing any increased rankings—or more importantly—increased business.

In this article, we’ll share with you seven simple SEO tasks that you can start doing right away. Some consist of making changes to your website while others focus on getting people to link back to you.

These tasks don’t take a lot of effort to put into practice, and you don’t need to be an “SEO guy” to gain a competitive advantage.

1. Install the Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Proper SEO consists of both on-page (changes made to your website) and off-page optimization (getting links back to your website)—not old school SEO tricks.

Our WordPress SEO plugin of choice—Yoast SEO—is freely available and tremendously popular, with over one million active installs.

Once installed and activated from your WordPress backend, it enables you to perform nearly all important on-page SEO tasks. There’s also no shortage of online documentation, tips, and tutorials should you get stuck. The premium version starts at $69/year and comes with email support and added features like a redirect manager.

2. Yoast SEO: Optimize Your Page Titles and Descriptions

Next to a page’s content, the title is the most important on-page SEO ranking factor. It briefly describes your content and is the first thing people see when your page appears in a Google search engine results page (SERP).

For small service businesses, you’ll generally include keywords at the beginning of your title, brand at the end, and a benefit (and location) if it applies.

Although not considered a ranking factor, a page’s meta description shows up below the title in a Google SERP. It should accurately describe your content in 160 characters or less, and be conversion-focused to encourage click-throughs.

Here’s how to set them both: below the post editor in your WordPress back end, scroll down to the Yoast SEO section and click to set your title and meta description in the Snippet Editor:

3. Add Alt Text to Your Images

Alt text is a snippet of text that can be included when adding an image to your content. It’s intended to describe accurately the image for people unable to see it, and is useful for SEO purposes as well.

WordPress makes it easy to add alt text, so include any relevant keywords here (while still accurately describing the image):

Avoid the temptation to add extra, unrelated keywords in an attempt to trick the search engines. They have some ability to ‘understand’ images.

Include alt text with any new images, but add them to existing images as time permits too; it’ll only help.

4. Install a Caching Plugin to Improve Overall Site Speed

We’ve covered this important topic on the blog already, but in short, Google considers page load time a ranking factor. And, if visitors hit the back button before your site even loads, all your SEO efforts will be for nothing. Site speed matters.

5. Install a Sharing Plugin to Encourage Social Shares

Social platforms are used for content discovery and if your content resonates with a user, they’ll hopefully share it with their followers, increasing your exposure exponentially. If your content is memorable, eventually somebody will link to it from their own website, resulting in a valuable, unsolicited backlink.

SumoMe and Shareaholic are popular free plugins that can be installed easily from inside of WordPress. Once activated, you’ll have social sharing buttons automatically added to your posts, with many different display options available.

6. Acquire Local Citations and Keep Your ‘NAP’ Consistent

For some local businesses, getting quality backlinks can prove difficult. Business directories, on the other hand, have no problem listing your business Name, Address and Phone number (NAP), and can be great sources of local citations—an overall ranking factor for local SEO.

Search engines may have difficulty determining that “Bob’s Cleaning at 3rd and Main” and “Bob’s Home Cleaning Inc., 1200 W Main St.” are the same business, so keep your business contact details uniform and consistent.

7. Link to Your Own Content as Well as Others’

The Editorial Assistant by Zemanta plugin analyzes your content and suggests related posts from other websites you can link to. They also recommend your content to other bloggers and publishers, which can result in gaining quality backlinks.

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Solomon Thimothy is the Co-founder of Clickx. With clients internationally, Clickx helps businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on more exposure, more traffic and more leads. Follow him on twitter @sthimothy

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